lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

lines at winter; 2005; pencil on floor, street and wall

invitation card

Review, Göteborgs Posten 10 december 2005

The drawings measure up the room.

Therese Lundberg’s minimal engagement produces the room.

At a first sight it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. The rooms are empty, cleaned out white cubes. Then the drawings appear, like square-cut shadows, slightly darker grey tones set against the already grey floor.
Drawn fields of thin and narrow pencil-lines laid in parallel strokes across the floor. One of the fields spills across the skirting-board and continues up against the wall, yet meticulously retaining each line’s precision. Every line is both mechanical and sensitive, slightly shivering in its exact distance to its neighbour.
I am fumbling in my memory – it feels familiar, I have almost seen this before. I just don’t know where. In Eva Hesse’s late gouaches, in Agnes Martin, or in more contemporary artists such as Richard Wright and Harpa Arnadottír? Not quite.
Therese Lundberg’s artistic sensibility clearly and undoubtedly touches on minimalism, although her treatment of the material moves away from the industrial produced objects of the 60’s (here is undeniably a closeness to Hesse, something also apparent in Lundberg’s exhibition at Galleri 54 a couple of years ago).
Her floor-drawings are more than pictures. They measure up the room and emphasize already existing forms and previous events. One field seems to have caught the sunlight through a windowpane; another corresponds with the traces of a shut door. In this way, not only spatial, but also time-dimensions are being formulated. If one wants, the drawings mark out the recollection of the room.
The exhibitions at Mors Mössa don’t usually splash with effects and sweeping gestures, they often tend towards the fastidious and low-voiced. Therese Lundberg draws that line, both literal and figurative, towards its outermost consequence, and succeeds to make a statement despite the fact that the gallery is for a greater part composed of empty space. If an expression can be sensitive and anemic simultaneously, then this is it.

Ann-Charlotte Glasberg Blomqvist

Translation: Therese Lundberg
See Swedish version at www.gp.se